Bridal shower cookies

These tea cup & tea pot cookies were made for a bridal shower.

Unfortunately, they did not make it there intact. They are the only cookies I've ever shipped to break like that!

Luckily, I did figure out what was wrong so that that hopefully won't happen in the future.
I have done most of my baking in the fall, winter, and spring, so the hot and wet summer meant I needed to use more flour in the dough to get it as sturdy as normal. Plus, I now bake cookies that will be shipped a little longer to ensure they will be sturdy for the trip. These were softer, which is tasty, but dangerous for travel.

I was devastated that they broke in transit, but glad to have learned more about properly shipping my cookies.

Fixing Mistakes

I had some extra icing and dough from the birthday ladybug cookies that I didn't want to go to waste, so, along with a batch of black, red, and white butterflies, I took the opportunity to try out a little apple cookie cutter I'd not used yet.

One thing I learned pretty quickly when I picked up this new hobby is that mistakes are inevitable with a medium as fragile as sugar. Often these mistakes just get eaten by Andrew, one of our friends, or myself, but sometimes a messed up cookie can be salvaged.

A common problem I have is when flood icing leaks off the edge of a cookie. This happened with one of the apples.

To fix the mistake, I first waited until the icing had hardened for a few hours. Then, I pulled the cookie off of the baking sheet.

I gently rubbed off the icing to the edge of the cookie with my clean fingers.

Because I had added the white stripe to the cookie before it leaked, I had to cover up part of the stripe with red icing. I piped on just a tiny bit and worked it into the right place with a clean paint brush.

After allowing the new icing to dry for a few minutes, I piped on a new white stripe.

It's still obvious that one cookie is messed up, but not as obvious as before. After it dried completely, it looked even better.

I never actually finished the apple cookies; I just didn't want to make a tiny bit of green icing for only three sets of stems and leaves. Maybe in the fall I'll make a whole batch of red, green, and yellow apples!

Early Cookie Decorating Attempts

I'm not feeling well today; my stupid sinuses causing me problems, so no new baking or decorating projects to showcase. Instead, here are some of my first attempts at cookie decorating from when I started in June.

These are the second batch of cookies I decorated. They don't look awful, but the piping is pretty bad (I can't say my piping is wonderful now, though. That's something that takes lots of practice).

What I remember most about these cookies is the intense almond flavor of the icing. I didn't have any clear vanilla at the time, so I used almond to flavor my icing and my hand slipped, spilling about a quarter of a bottle of almond extract into the icing.

This was the only successful product of my very first cookie decorating experiment. The others look pretty unappatizing. Trying to figure out the proper icing consistancy as well as a failed attempt at mixing food coloring to get purple resulted in this mess:

They looked gross, but they tasted fine.

I learned a lot from my mistakes in both these early batches. I think my third cookie decorating project was much more successful. It produced these cookies

I'm really loving this new hobby. I'm so glad a ran across a few really helpful blogs that gave me the confidence to try this myself!

Comic cookies

Comics are fun to make into cookies. They usually have simple shapes and just a few solid colors, which makes them easy to outline and flood.

Plus, they're fun!

I used black icing and a small icing tip (#1) to outline the characters. Then, I filled in the spaces with the appropriate color. I waited about 30 minutes for the outline to dry and at least 10-15 minutes for each flooded section to set before I filled in the adjacent section. If you don't wait long enough, two adjacent flooded sections can sometimes blend together over the black line, and I wanted to make sure the black lines showed just like the do in the comics.

I let the flooded icing dry about an hour before I put on the facial features.

The longer you wait for icing to dry the less likely you'll end up with bleeding. This waiting is especially important with black icing. I didn't wait long enough for these to dry. Next time I'll let the cookies sit overnight instead of just 30 minutes. You'll notice that Charlie Brown looks normal here:

But in this picture, taken the next morning, he looks like he has a beard:

That was definitely not intended.

Luckily, Snoopy did not suffer the same fate.

The Dilbert cookies have a little color bleeding, but it didn't ruin them.

I learned a few important lessons from this experiment.

1. Let black icing dry overnight to prevent bleeding.

2. Get a square cookie cutter. Using a pizza cutter and eyeballing it doesn't have the most even results.

3. Skin color icing needs white* added to it first to make it more opaque. The skin looked a bit greenish because the blue background showed through.

But over all, I'm happy with the comic cookies. Especially Snoopy. He makes me smile.

* Yes, they have white icing color, and I've learned that it's really important to use it. It makes the white brighter and more opaque so the background color won't show through. It's also handy if you want to lighten a color.